Italy is a great country
for pianists who become legendary by
not playing. Michelangeli’s gradual
retreat into semi-silent perfection
was known the world over and I have
already discussed on this site the Aura
CDs dedicated to Guido Agosti and Carlo
Zecchi. To these names might be added
the elusive figure of Sergio Fiorentino,
whose art may be investigated on a number
of Concert Artist discs, and Dino Ciani
who met a tragically early death. More
recently the art of Maurizio Pollini
has certainly not been withheld from
the public though the austerity of his
musical personality has lent a certain
mystique to his name.

Just to repeat the
salient facts, Zecchi was born in Rome
in 1903, made his Italian debut in 1920,
first performed abroad in 1922, studied
with Busoni and later with Schnabel
in Berlin and made his first tour of
the United States in 1931. In 1939 he
had a car accident which meant that
after the war he played only as the
duo partner of the cellist Enrico Mainardi,
otherwise concentrating on conducting
– he toured America with the Florence
May Festival Orchestra in 1957 and was
permanent conductor of the Vienna Chamber
Orchestra from 1964 to 1976 – and teaching,
mostly at the S. Cecilia Academy in
Rome and the Salzburg Mozarteum. He
died in 1984.

As to the precise nature
of his withdrawal, both "noble"
and "ignoble" reasons have
been suggested. The "noble"
explanation is that maintaining his
art at the high level which his perfectionism
required of him was costing him much
psychological strain – he studied 12
or 13 hours a day – and the accident
gave him an "excuse" to bow
out gracefully, especially in view of
the emergence of Michelangeli, against
whom he would have had to measure himself.
The "ignoble" reason is that
he had received a handsome sum from
his insurance company as compensation
for the curtailment of his solo career,
and, being notoriously tight-fisted,
chose to keep the money rather than
hand it back and start playing again.
Thus the myth grew up of a supremely
great pianist whose actual solo career
had ended long ago and was scarcely
documented in sound.

After hearing the present
compilation of his early Cetra recordings
(which account for most of his recorded
repertoire as a pianist), I am inclined
to suggest a further reason, arising
from a gradual evolution in his musical
priorities. The two discs are neatly
divided pre-accident and post-accident
(so the interruption of his solo playing
was not immediate) and the group of
1937 recordings reveals, in all probability,
the greatest of all Italian pianists,
with the perfection of Michelangeli
but without his remoteness, and with
the flair of Agosti but without his
unreliability. The baroque items combine
dazzling fingerwork with poise, grace
and verve, the Liszt pieces extract
glistening poetry from the barrage of
notes and the Chopin Barcarolle is miraculous
for the way in which extreme rubato
is never allowed to obscure the basic
rocking movement of the boat. The Valse
could be considered a little over the
top, though wonderful in its way.

But now we come to
the point. There are "pianist-pianists"
and "musician-pianists" and
Zecchi, at the zenith of his pianistic
career, was a "pianist-pianist",
more evidently a pupil of Busoni than
of Schnabel. But meanwhile the lesson
of Schnabel was gestating within him.
If we compare the 1942 Berceuse with
the 1937 Barcarolle we find no less
technical perfection and beauty of sound,
but we also find a different sort of
fidelity towards the written text. This
could be a blueprint for a future Pollini
performance. Much the same could be
said of the two Mazurkas from the same
year, the Debussy eschews mere effect
to concentrate on purely musical values
and the Schumann is magical in its simplicity.
In other words Zecchi the musician was
leaving behind him the bag of tricks
of the typical romantic virtuoso pianist
with the result that, even had no accident
occurred, the emergence of a Zecchi
disinclined to spend hours polishing
up his digital perfection and ready
to find increasing rewards in conducting
(and also teaching) appears a perfectly
logical progression.

Whether or not Zecchi
the conductor ever matched Zecchi the
pianist is not a question which will
be answered by the recordings here of
works by Geminiani and Corelli, warmly
expressive and well phrased though they
are. A reissue of his 1954 Concertgebouw
recordings plus a trawl through Italian
and Austrian Radio archives should provide
some of the answers. But whatever answers
they provide, nothing can dim the extraordinary
pianistic flair of those 1937 recordings,
which reveal Zecchi to have been a giant
among 20th Century pianists.

The Bach Brandenburg
Concerto is also notable for the presence
of Gioconda De Vito, another great Italian
musician (but also the flautist is well
remembered in Italy). This performance
is in many ways preferable to the more
celebrated one led by Adolf Busch with
Rudolf Serkin as pianist. Not, perhaps,
in the first movement, where the Busch
players were at their finest, though
even here Zecchi’s cadenza perhaps surpasses
Serkin’s in flair while yielding nothing
in musicianship. But the Busch second
movement was excessively dominated by
the flute – there is more genuine interplay
between the parts in the Italian version,
while in the finale the Italian players
know that the dotted rhythms in a 6/8
movement are to be smoothed out to match
the triplets – they have a true dance
feeling, for which also the conductor
Previtali should take due credit.

Lastly, the Schubert.
Zecchi seems to have been better aware
of this composer’s exposed nerve-ends
than most artists in those days though
as a consequence he sometimes loses
sight of the music’s ability to assuage
as well as to disturb.

The recordings are
in a variable state of preservation
– the most famous pieces (the Chopin,
mainly) often revealing very worn copies
indeed, and Schumann’s "Hobby-Horse"
has a big scratch that, infuriatingly,
almost but not quite coincides with
the rhythm of the music itself. The
notes are very informative and the English
translation is good. This supersedes
the Aura disc as a representation of
Carlo Zecchi and, as far as Zecchi the
pianist is concerned, it is virtually
all we are ever going to have, so lovers
of great piano-playing should not miss
it.

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